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Unleash Prosperity Hotline Issue #1414
12/17/2025
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1) We Guess That's Why They Call Them the Blues

We've reported on these pages in recent weeks that at least five big blue states are seriously considering soak-the-rich tax hikes.

The list so far includes California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, and New York.

Maybe they are emboldened by socialist Zohran Mamdani’s big win to become New York’s next mayor, or maybe they believe their own propaganda that taxes don’t matter.

It's about as ill-fated as trying another Bay of Pigs invasion.

We went to our VoteWithYourFeet website ([link removed]) and calculated how many people and how much money has been lost in the 10 states over the past decade.

Here are the results: these states lost more than four million people and nearly $1 trillion in income to other lower tax states.
Our bar graph title, "Net Domestic Migration of States with Top State and Local Tax Rates (2012-2022)."
Our bar graph with the title, "Cumulative AGI Gain or Loss of States with Top State and Local Tax Rates."

The blue states seem determined to keep raising tax rates until they've successfully chased every multimillionaire and billionaire out of their states.

They’re off to a great start.

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2) Federal Government Employment Hits Lowest Level Since 2014

Here's another way to look at yesterday's jobs numbers. President Trump has shrunk the federal government to its 2014 headcount.
A bar chart with the title, "Total Federal Employment, November, 2007-2025."
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3) Rent Control Causes Homelessness

The WSJ reports on a natural experiment in rent control in the twin cities of Minnesota, where St. Paul enacted rent control laws. They capped annual increases at 3%, while Minneapolis went the other way and streamlined permitting to encourage new construction.

In 2022, St. Paul enacted one of the strictest rent-control regimes in the country. The ordinance capped annual rent increases at 3% for most apartments, even empty ones. It didn't adjust for inflation.

Across the Mississippi River, Minneapolis steered clear of rent control. Instead, city officials strictly focused on creating new housing. A package of land-use revisions in 2020 made it easier to build apartments, in part by removing restrictions that limited housing to single-family homes.

The result:

Permits to build apartments in St. Paul plummeted by 79% in early 2022 from the year before, according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Real-estate investment activity nearly froze. Developers halted new projects as lenders pulled back...

St. Paul officials are now walking back parts of the ordinance, voting in May to exempt new construction and properties built after 2004.
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4) State Voter Registration Rolls Are Still a Mess

The Pew Research Center estimates that some 20% of names on voter registration lists are inaccurate or mistaken or flawed. Some voters are dead, some have moved out of states.

Some will have moved out of state. Some will have registered at trailer courts or UPS postal service outlets, and other places that are ripe for abuse.

Blue-run states such as Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are some of the worst offenders in refusing to clean up their rolls even though the Help America Vote Act requires states to maintain proper and effective voter registration and voter lists.

So this week, the Justice Department filed new federal lawsuits against four new states claiming they are blocking efforts to improve voter integrity.
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Justice has sued Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada along with 14 other states for failure to produce statewide voter registration lists upon request.

"If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will," says Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.

Democratic officials offer increasingly awkward “the dog ate my homework” excuses for not providing the data.

"The Justice Department is trying to get us to turn over the private, personal information of more than 8 million state residents," claims Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

"I told them they can't have it."

Really? The data voters surrender to states isn't much beyond name, address and their Social Security number. Michigan has done far worse with its data leaks, including a 2023 Michigan State University breach that affected thousands of students, staff, and others.

Any state that resists turning over basic data on its voter registration lists is either providing cover for potential voter fraud or is incompetent in keeping its records - or probably both.
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5) Obamacare Everlasting

These two charts from EPIC show that since COVID was used as an excuse to eliminate caps and minimum premium payments, the number of Americans receiving Obamacare subsidies has doubled. The number of Americans with incomes at least four times the official poverty rate has quadrupled.
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Is Obamacare working? For Democrats, yes. It was always supposed to fail and usher in single payer government control.
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6) Santa Got Run Over by a Windmill
Our humor item showing Santa's sleigh caught in a windmill.

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